Michael Morse

Five Little God  Poems

Little God (Labrador)

I will not venture out into the flats.

Not today. It's Monday. And Sunday

serves us habitual grit and contemplation

as a dish of incremental coins collected.

See how the bivalves sit, still souls

found and kept and conveniently projected?

In currency we make ourselves a PowerPoint—

What otherwise is there in a cerulean atlas

half-cherrystone, half-almanac, both homespun

and mercurial with territories uncharted?

Little God, I give the bucket, rake, and boots a break.

The beds are out under the bay, little brine mines

with ordnance slow and benefits of happenstance.

Given or lent? We let them be and find ourselves.

We happen to our finding here. A tongue. A tanker.

We embrace two different kinds of Labrador—

the kind that hunts in perpetual haste

and that place which never asked to be discovered.

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Little God   (Calling)

Today I woke with my little black god

at my side as if clouds and their clung-love

of dust to vapor had risen elsewhere

and come hell-bent for this burnt range.

Call our love antithesis or antinomian:

My calling is a double negative, and if

I'm lost in walking than I'm working out a trail.

My little black god floats in the white of my eye.

Her spirit circles fresh water and rips up cattails

because they're there for ripping so too

the lilies that spool from one self into many,

then asphodels who lend the lay-low bog

small clues aspiring towards verticals.

Look at me and then tend to your fields, says she,

the clover murmur and little white beds

like baby canines in treat fields intent

on tasting also-rans and yet-to-runs:

wake with whom you've chosen or who chooses you.

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Little God   (Sext)

When the day as potential ticks off towards noon

my little black god gets hungry and needs her mouth.

The better life is one we have to reconcile

with this one: who chooses, who picks, who fusses?

Who knows if breadcrumbs will bring finches

as when children dream up candy houses as their cages?

The day becomes its own noon, then after.

Every version of hungry cuts itself new teeth.

My little black god readies for her evensong;

So say the red-eyed, gray-green canopied singers

who start like flint because the summer sun

could smoke their wings right out from over them.

When we wait for the god to burn their singing,

it's a soundtrack some find lovely and others wicked.

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Little God (Estuary)

When the blue goes black, day done, lamps can blanch the dusk.

When late sessions of talk turn quiet, one volunteers to head home.

One gets in one’s car. Slot. Key. Dash of unearthly green light.

Turn. Some quick internal flare lifts to a low burn.

When the gravel crush goes near to far, quiet steps in, looms large.

When the light gets cut, outside comes in and claims the room.

One feels outside, hopeful to find himself under stars.

Thank you, one says, when clouds roll back and reveal one winter planet.

When the summer comes, crowds will fill the flood plain.

When the leaves leave, the-bucket-and-pails take flight.

One feels the bay’s best solitaire come winter’s February,

an oysterman at night out harvesting his bone-chill tidal bed.

When one heeds the sky-lovely swollen bruise, star-spat cultch,

fat and purple swell, out of the violet come blue-gray options.

When a space feels broad and empty like a chest,

One fills it with whatever heart one can.

Little God   (Crush)

Towards imperial tones, her stories move

from whisper to loudspeaker, rural children

who push a heavy wooden boat to the sea—

the marvels of harvested salt whose source

they have decided they must see for themselves.

They bring out the epicurean in me,

he who settles for salt on his supper.

It is enough. It adds a flavor.

I am all for vestiges and seasoning,

a flirt for whom suggestion is preferred.

So many tales and their forbidden engines:

She talks and turns her couture voice to crepuscule,

a late-lovely afternoon whose bleaching fades.

I am a man among men in white shirts.

She is a woman among women in black veils.

The words that she is saying, they are gray

claims that desire serves as our transgressor—

I want to ask of her how I might heal

myself so fully of that poverty.

The landscape I wish is lush and green,

verdant, even, despite my seeing

yellow tethered blossoms of come-hither.

What’s upon me is not separate any longer—

these blossoms on a pond of carp provide

immediate clouds and steeples of felt shade.

A man sings to a full house of white shirts,

a woman to an empty auditorium

less dilapidated as her voice is beautiful.

She becomes the salt without which I can’t eat.